Field Work and Data Collection

A Kitchen-Garden intervention to understand Women Autonomy and Resource Sharing within the Household in rural India (with Sounak Thakur, Chitwan Lalji, Debayan Prakashi, and Andaleeb Rahman)

Severe malnutrition, especially amongst children, has been a persistent problem in India. With 14% of children undernourished, 34.7% stunted (low height for age) and 17.3% children wasted (low weight for height), the 2020 Global Hunger Index placed India under the “serious” category. In fact, India was ranked 94th out of the 107 countries, behind its neighbors such as Bangladesh and Pakistan. Sounak and Debayan obtained grants from JPAL and IITK to conduct a Randomized Controlled Trial (RCT) to measure the effect of a kitchen-garden intervention on severe malnutrition in India.  Women in households in the treatment group were provided with access to a workshop on how to raise a small kitchen garden in their backyard. Households in the treatment group have been provided with information on the nutritional value of different vegetables and fruits, information related to the benefits and costs associated with zero budget farming techniques (which encourages use of own seeds and locally available natural fertilizers). To examine whether monetary incentives improve take-up, a subset of treated households were also offered a cash reimbursement of input costs conditional upon raising and maintaining a kitchen garden.  As part of the STAAARS+ Fellowship program, Chitwan, Andaleeb and I joined the team and we are now working together on the evaluation of the intervention. The first order objectives of the intervention are to estimate its effect on nutrition and dietary diversity, however, women being the target of the kitchen garden intervention may affect women's time use and decision-making power in the household. We have baseline, midline and endline survey data on consumption and nutrition outcomes. We also obtained additional grant funding to conduct experiments to measure the effect of the intervention on women's autonomy, risk and time preferences. We also are using an innovative module to measure time use, particularly focused on capturing multitasking by women.

Intimate Partner Violence and Alcohol Mitigation Intervention in Western Kenya (with David Murphy)

The numerous short and long-run health effects of alcohol abuse resulted in 3 million deaths worldwide in 2016 (5.3\% of all deaths (WHO, 2018). These health effects include the increased likelihood of injuries, poisonings, hypertension, heart and liver disease, digestive problems, cancer, among many others (CDC, 2021). Moreover, negative externalities of alcohol use abound, such as road accidents (Nakaguma & Restrepo., 2018, Francesconi & James, 2019) household violence (Markowitz, 2000, Angelucci, 2008, Averett and Wang, 2016), and long-run effects on children prenatally exposed to alcohol (Nilsson, 2017).  We conducted an intervention in Western Kenya among households in which at least one spouse consumes alcohol. The intervention was done in joint work with Giselle Foundation and consisted on trainings and counseling sessions to inform households of the consequences of consuming alcohol and to develop a mitigation plan jointly with their spouse. We collected baseline between August and Dec 2020, then a midline to examine the effects within a couple months of the intervention between March and June 2021, and endline data collection from May to June 2022, a year after the intervention. We collected detailed data on intimate partner violence in these households using direct elicitation and list experiments.  We also conducted experiments to measure time preferences, intra-household efficiency, and women's autonomy in the household.

Kenya - Upper Tana River Watershed (with Yuta Masuda and Wei Zhang)

As part of a larger project to examine the land and water use in the Upper Tana River area in Kenya, we collected a  survey among 540 randomly selected households in 30 villages. We conducted a series of experiments between spouses. Household members played several rounds of a trust game and a dictator game with and without communication at their homes.  We also invited all surveyed households to participate in lab experiments where they played an extraction game, voluntary contributions game, and elicited both time and risk preferences. We seek to understand how farmers in this region cooperate in the provision of public goods, and to test whether there are gender differences in allocation of resources inside the household and at the community level.

Intra-Household Bargaining under Incomplete Information: Experimental Study of Income Withholding between Spouses in India

The study used bargaining experiments with established couples in India to examine intra-household allocations in the presence of asymmetric information over the quantity of resources available to one spouse.  The data collection and experiment took place in Dehradun and Almora districts, in Uttarakhand, India between March and June 2013. The sample consists of 183 established couples, half from Dehradun and the other half from Almora. Recruiting of subjects was done door-to-door. Enumerators knocked, asked if both spouses were home and if they were willing to answer some questions about managing household finances. Respondents were then asked if they had children between the ages of 3–18 years old, and were only interviewed if they met this criterion. No information about potential earnings (or that they would receive an LED lamp as a thank you for participating) was provided prior to spouses agreeing to participate. Spouses participated in multiple rounds of a public goods game, one round of a trust game, and one round of a dictator game. A sum of money of between 50 and 90% of daily household income was split between the couple. In the public goods game, spouses were asked to propose an allocation of the amount of money they individually received between a personal account, a household account, and his or her partner's account. The money invested into the household account earned 50% interest and was divided evenly between the couple, while the other two accounts were paid at parity. Spouses made decisions individually, without feedback or communication. Households were assigned to one of three conditions that varied whether one of the spouses had private information, received no differential information from their partner, or had the choice to keep information private. To capture the effect of asymmetric information on the pre-bargaining stage, one of the spouses was given the opportunity to earn extra money if he or she won a coin flip in addition to receiving a sum of money that their partner knew about (the aforementioned endowment. The information conditions applied only to the additional money. In the private information condition (PI), individuals were not allowed to share the winnings with their partner. Maintaining the winnings private is costly because the money is not eligible to be invested into the household account and cannot earn interest. In the complete information condition (CI), the winnings were known to both spouses, and were eligible to be allocated freely between the three different accounts. In the third condition, individuals could choose whether to keep the winnings private (conceal) or not (disclose) in which case their partner would be informed of the additional earnings. 

Consumer Search in the Gasoline Retail Market (with Tim Haab)

As part of a large multidisciplinary project, we conducted an Internet survey among a random sample of drivers in the State of Ohio in April 2009 to collect information on intended search behavior among gasoline consumers. The survey examined consumer preferences with respect to a variety of fuels, including gasoline. The survey was administered through Knowledge Networks, a firm that specializes in Internet surveys by taking a random sample of drivers in the State of Ohio from their panel. Respondents were first asked questions about the vehicles they drove, such as mileage per gallon, and the price they paid per gallon the last time they had purchased gasoline. They were then asked a set of questions about their price expectations, including the price they expected to pay, as well as the minimum and maximum price they thought they would find if they purchased gasoline at that time. In the choice experiment, we elicited willingness to search for gasoline prices via an online survey.  Respondents were asked to assume they were driving and had to purchase gasoline. There were two treatments implemented jointly. They were provided with a price quote framed as the price they observed at the first gas station they saw. The price quote was randomly assigned from one of five treatments: 2.5% or 5% below, 2.5% or 5% above, or equal to the price the respondent stated they expected to pay. After observing the price quote, and being reminded of the price they told us they expected to pay, respondents were asked to choose between (a) buying gasoline at that gas station, or (b) driving to the next gas station located one mile down the road. All respondents were told that the next gas station was one mile down the road. However, we also randomized whether the respondent was provided information on the monetary value of the gasoline she would spend driving one mile to the next gas station according to the price they paid last time, the time it would take them to drive there, both, and neither. Our objectives were to test whether consumers of gasoline exhibited asymmetric willingness to search depending on whether prices were above or below their reference price, and whether consumers exhibit inattention to some search costs and not others.